I want dropdownlist to appear in gridview ONLY when in edit mode

I have a working, editable gridview. One of the columns in my gridview is employeeID, which is represented by a dropdownlist control (DataTextField="employeeName", DataValueField="employeeID"). Another column is an "edit" link.

So when I load the page, I see my gridview with all 10 records. Each of the 10 records has its own "edit" link. Each of the 10 records also has its own "employeeID" dropdownlist column.

When I click "edit" for one of the records and make a change in its "employeeID" dropdown menu, then click "update", my changes show up fine in my gridview. So the general plumbing works.

My question is this: Is it possible to show the dropdownlist control ONLY for the active record (i.e. when the user has clicked "edit" for a particular record), instead of showing the dropdownlist control for ALL records when just in view mode (vs. edit mode). It just seems pointless to have all those dropdownmenus populated when I could just display the employee name (for all but the selected/active record) as a label when in view mode.

I'm particularly interested in whether there is a "no-code-necessary" way of doing this in Visual Studio 2005.

If I am understanding you correctly you want to be able to show the drop down list only when editing a single item within the gridview edit mode. For this purpose you didn't really need an Editable gridview

If I am understanding you correctly you want to be able to show the drop down list only when editing a single item within the gridview edit mode. For this purpose you didn't really need an Editable gridview at all. You could have simple just edited the item templates of your columns, while dragging the drop down list within the edit template view.

For simplicity state I'll show you an example with a gridview named gridview1 and a single column named Testfield. The testfield column is a gridview templatefield. I simply dragged a label within the item template and a dropdownlist within the edit template.

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